The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost vision (original) (raw)
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Feminist Opposition to Abortion: Reframing Histories to Limit Reproductive Rights
2015
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Feminism and Abortion Politics: Choice, Rights and Reproductive Freedom
Synopsis -This paper examines the problems associated with feminist articulations of rights claims and other alternatives for advocating reproductive freedom. Criticisms of private choice advocacy in particular, and rights advocacy in general, are considered, along with proposals either to abandon rights claims in favour of care theory on the one hand, or advocate gendered citizenship on the other. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser and Drucilla Cornell, the author argues that the category of the rights-bearing citizen should not be thought to be necessarily masculinized, in virtue of the assumption of ''indivisibility,'' and that making rights claims does not necessarily entail reproducing a gendered public/private dichotomy. Thus, this paper contends that rights theory offers a worthwhile platform for feminist advocacy of reproductive freedom. D
Feminism and abortion politics
Womens Studies International Forum, 2002
Synopsis -This paper examines the problems associated with feminist articulations of rights claims and other alternatives for advocating reproductive freedom. Criticisms of private choice advocacy in particular, and rights advocacy in general, are considered, along with proposals either to abandon rights claims in favour of care theory on the one hand, or advocate gendered citizenship on the other. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser and Drucilla Cornell, the author argues that the category of the rights-bearing citizen should not be thought to be necessarily masculinized, in virtue of the assumption of ''indivisibility,'' and that making rights claims does not necessarily entail reproducing a gendered public/private dichotomy. Thus, this paper contends that rights theory offers a worthwhile platform for feminist advocacy of reproductive freedom. D
A Right to Ourselves: Women's Suffrage and the Birth Control Movement
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2020
The suffrage and birth control movements are often treated separately in historical scholarship. This essay brings together new research to demonstrate their close connections. Many suffragists became active in the birth control movement just before and after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The roots of suffrage arguments were deeply embedded in the same ideas that were foundational to the birth control movement: bodily freedom and notions of what constituted full and participatory citizenship. Beginning in the 1840s, women's rights reformers directly connected the vote to a broad range of economic and political issues, including the concept of self-ownership. Wide-ranging debates about individual autonomy remained present in women's rights rhetoric and were then repeated in the earliest arguments for legalizing birth control. The twentieth-century birth control movement, like the suffrage movement before it (which had largely focused only on achieving the v...
Women's Reproductive Rights - Spoiled for Choice?
Precedent Issue 122, 2018
Globally, women’s reproductive rights are under renewed attack. This is evident not only in measures being taken to restrict access to reproductive rights, but also in an increasing trend to commodify and commandeer women’s reproductive capacities generally. At the same time as women’s access to family planning services are being limited, their ‘choices’ for selling the use of their bodies and their children for the gratification of others are increasing.
2021
In feminist philosophy, there is a silent but consistent recurrence of criticisms regarding the mainstream, “liberal” defense of the right to abortion, most prominently exemplified by Judith Jarvis Thomson’s seminal paper “A Defense of Abortion”. In this paper, I explore the feminist proposals of Alison M. Jaggar (1975) and Sally Markowitz (1990) and examine, in light of these, the prospects of a particularly feminist ethics of abortion. I argue that although feminist theorists are right to say that defenses based on bodily autonomy set the wrong agenda for public discourse, thus contributing to a misleading and uninformed debate, Thomsonian arguments still have considerable advantages, both in philosophy and in the public discourse. In particular, while Thomsonian accounts can successfully sidestep the conflict between the mother’s and the fetus’s rights, currently available feminist proposals can meaningfully transform but cannot eliminate this problem.
The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2021
Sad to say for women, this book is timely in our present United States political climate that is striving against social progress. The authors address the ongoing resistance in society and individuals to women's basic rights to have dominion over their own bodies and minds. This same story of female subjugation goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. 1 Women themselves alas can echo that conscious or unconscious desire, perceiving it as their best survival strategy. These tragically abiding struggles in society and individual hostilities generated by treating "female" as a negative "otherness" will be no surprise to most psychodynamic therapists. What is perceived as "other"in this case embodied women and I believe especially in their procreative roles-calls forth aggressive desires to master and to regulate them. 2 Such features of women's lives can be readily exemplified and explored in relation to social history, the law, and institutions. These topics are gathered into this wonderful contemporary volume of writings. The collection also encompasses and examines the complex psychic processes that result in many of the contemporary subjective discomforts of being female, and inhabiting the female body in a recalcitrant society.
Many feminist theorists began to attack the institution of reproduction as the source of their exclusion from the sphere of production. The role of reproduction was said to keep women in the home and maintain the sexual division of labour. The only way to escape from a woman’s ‘biological fate’ was to gain control of reproduction. This led many second-wave feminists, and feminists in the continuing decades, to focus on the issues of contraception, abortion, and condemning the oppressive role of motherhood. Nonetheless, a number of women during this time disagreed with feminism’s exclusive focus on reproductive rights, and most specifically, the right to an abortion. Throughout this essay, I will focus on the history of reproductive rights within feminism, the motives and demands of a specific American pro-life feminist movement, Feminists for Life (FFL), and how this group is problematic in its maintenance of/contradiction to feminist values.